I just made a batch of strawberry-blueberry with the rest. Because, you know, it wasn’t nearly hot enough in Baltimore and I felt the need to heat up the house some more. :rolleyes:
But it sounds delicious, and was probably completely worth it.
Canned Goods? Greg Brown did write it. (Cite: The liner notes of “One More Goodnight Kiss”).
It’s part and parcel. Blistering hot day and there you are, over a kettle of boiling fruit. Do you seal by boiling the jars, inverting, what?
Boiling water bath, like every good masochist. “THEY” say no other method (aside from pressure cooking) isn’t sufficient to kill bacteria. It just annoys me that when I put the seals on after putting the jam in, they pop. And yet, I gotta boil them. In 100F heat.
At least I don’t live in Florida.
No kidding. Living in the hot and humid Northeast is bad enough. Come mid-August, New York is just delightfully sweltering enough. I figure hell, just do it. Last year I bought a large box of peaches ( 25 pounds? More? ) with the intention of making a new batch of Spiced Peach Jamm.
Then, unfortunately or not, Bad Things Occurred and the peaches went over and rotted and I had other things to focus on. Now, there’s pretty much no Jamm in the house. That hasn’t happened in 23 years, I think.
Come heck or high water, this August I think I need to boil some jars. 
Cartooniverse
Try fuzzy navel jam, which Blue Kangaroo and I made last fall. Peach and Cointreau.
How fuzzy could that navel remain after the alcohol burns off during the cooking? Man… I bet it tastes amazing, booze content or not. Thanks- will try that. Similarly, why not Triple Sec and Peach?
It tastes very amazing. Most popular jam I gave away, in most cases.
No reason why it couldn’t be Triple Sec instead, just that I don’t know much about alcohol, so when I went to the liquor store and asked for the smallest bottle of “orange liquor” possible, that’s what they directed me to.
You know, strawberry-orange would be good too. Booze content or not!
Fuzzy navel jam. Is that when you forget to take the skin off the peaches? Or is it when you forget to put the lid back on the jam and leave it out on the counter? I tried making peach jam with brandy once, and found that putting it in before cooking drove off most of the flavor in addition to the alcohol. Then I started putting some in the jar just before adding the fruit. I’d still boil the sealed jar, but any alcohol still stayed inside. Talk about your breakfast of champions…
Huh. I went to look up the lyrics when I made that post and found this site. Looks like that one is filed in the wrong place.
Boiling water bath for me, too. Which is another reason why I freeze the berries to make jam in the winter. I’m not a purist; I use Sure-Jell (the lower sugar variety), and I freeze my fruit per “batch”. I found that 2 quarts of strawberries equalled one batch, so I have eight batches tucked into the freezer and sleeping peacefully. Some will go solo, some will be mixed with batches of peaches, and the rest with batches of raspberries and peaches.
Next on my list is sour (pie) cherries, which should be ready about this weekend or so. Blackberries will probably be ready when I am away on vacation, so I’ll have to grab as much as I can before I go, and then when I get back. I have some friends from the Azores, and blackberries (amoras) grow wild there. My wild blackberry jam reminds them of home.
We’ve taken to buysing 1/2 flats of strawberries each weekend and drying them using the Good Eats method.
We found commercial dehydrators partially cooked the fruit. Using only fuirnace filters, drying sheets, and box fans we can dry about 3 pounds of berries in 24 hours and they are fresh as fresh can be. We’re also starting up cherries since the season is just kicking off.
I am desolated… I had only found one place close to home that had the pie cherries, and they cut down the trees because they were ailing. Most of the farmstands and U-Pick places around here only have sweet cherries, which isn’t even close to the same thing. In fact, when I called one place and asked if they had pie cherries:
“You know, everyone calls to ask that, but no, we only have sweet cherries.”
:smack: You’d think that if “everyone” was asking for them…
I gave a gift of three kinds of jam today. The recipients were most grateful.
The trick to alcohol is to add it at the very end so it doesn’t get cooked off. I made some very nice brandy peach jam and chambord peach jam that way.
No one around here grows sour cherries either so I planted a couple of dwarf trees in my backyard several years ago. They’re starting to yield really well if I get to them before the birds do. And if late frosts don’t kill the blooms like the past two years. They ripened in June and I got about 15 pounds from them. (Plus sixty-some chigger bites-in my own yard!) Every single cherry pitted by hand, by me. Sour cherries are too small to do any other way. Aren’t they lovely? And very, very tasty.
